


the sound of one hand

by chaparral_crown



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Disfigurement, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, Homesickness, Implied Patricide, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, M/M, Non-Graphic Smut, Scar Worship, Season/Series 03, Slow Burn, Will Graham is a Mess, World Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:00:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25889995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaparral_crown/pseuds/chaparral_crown
Summary: “Why are you looking for him after he left you with a smile?” she asks, and truth be told, Will wishes he understood why he wants that too.---In the aftermath of the Prisoner’s death, Chiyoh doesn’t take Will to Hannibal in Florence. She takes him to Murasaki to better understand the splintering of their family, and why Hannibal is what he is. Doesn’t every family have a prodigal child?Season 3 AU.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 32
Kudos: 98





	1. 無明 - mumyō - ignorance

Two pilgrims stood

Before a river of fire:

The first one remarked,

“Let’s just walk across quickly.”

The second let him go first.

\---

( _Why do you like Hannibal Lecter?_ )

Really, it’s a good question, and nobody seems to ask it, or spend much time thinking about it. A foregone conclusion, Will thinks, inconsequential, the sunk cost fallacy coming home to roost in the space near to his appendix but free and clear of his kidneys. “That’s frightful good luck for you, Mr. Graham,” the attending doctor in the ICU tells him, like he should send a thank you note. 

There’s a thread of accusation from most people that Will survives his experience on the kitchen floor. It's treated with suspicion, like he personally submitted a request for an insidious looking injury that he actually had a good chance of surviving with medical intervention, and Hannibal obliges because that’s what he does - obliges in ways you didn’t actually want. Kade Purnell implies it. Alana implies it. Jack implies it. Chilton implies it. Freddie implies it, and adds insult to injury by photographing him looking remarkably like he’s donated his body to science and is mid-dissection. “Oh, he didn’t actually want to kill you, you’re actually still a suspect for accessory to murder because the strange, smiling, butcher man in the brownstone house knows where to put the knife.” 

( _Boy, does he ever._ ) 

This is of course a ridiculous assumption - Alana’s the one that calls in the calvary before walking into a disaster. Bella Crawford reinforces it with a swift, raspy call of her own, calm and collected. The terror of losing her husband doesn’t rough up the edges of her message, even if she is quick, concise, and exacting in confirming with the emergency dispatch that they’ve arrived at the townhouse - she’s going to lose him in a few months, and perhaps she’d merely prefer it not be quite yet. Everything in her own time. Will admires it. 

He doesn’t remember much about the paramedics, only how they taped off the holter monitors, but they wouldn’t stick to his chest because there’s so much blood that they don’t stay in place and there's a thread of panic between the medics that permeates the space between him and Abigail. A grim-faced young woman with her dark hair tied back in a ponytail tries to say something comforting when they lift him on the spineboard, and he floats off the ground and somewhere else. ( _Your fingers were so stiff, so desperate to grab something, but they don’t unclench because what is there possibly left to grab?_ ) He listens to the recording of Bella’s call as a running meditation to ground himself in the reality of _yes, that happened._

There was every opportunity for Will to just bleed to death. Will thinks sometimes this was the intention by making sure he couldn’t die too quickly. Maybe he was to grieve until his last breath. Here lies Will Graham who, unlike Bella Crawford, made the wrong call. We fondly remember how he couldn’t make a decision to save his life and anyone else’s. With him in death, he is joined by the daughter he has no claim to in lineage or time spent fostering, because that feeling of filial obligation is stolen. He will not be given an opportunity to make it real, or grow out of it, as Will Graham has learned to do over a lifetime of his empathy overtaking logic. She’s not the first he’s clung to accidentally, and she’ll not be the last. 

Which brings him back to Hannibal, and this clinging problem he has.

There’s more reasons to **not** consider Hannibal his friend than there are for Will to proceed on his merry way like they’ve merely had a very minor disagreement. Yet here they are, overlooked, like the flaws in their relationship are something as simple as having an acquaintance with a harmless tendency to lie about small details, or alternatively an overbearing family member with more opinions than sense. Everyone has someone like that. It only makes sense with Will’s luck that his person is an ex-surgeon with a penchant for post-mortem dinner theatre that wants _him_ to do awful things, as well as do awful things _to_ him. 

Honestly, Will doesn’t understand why anyone would like him when they have the full picture. It's why it absolutely burns Will like a match to know he himself misses Hannibal. Transference, Will thinks. Stockholm Syndrome. Enmeshment. Traumatic bonding. There’s an entire career waiting for someone who wants to look into the reasons why he can’t let the image of Hannibal, gently holding his neck, putting a knife where he wants the knife to go like he’s just grabbing Will by the gills to lift him out of the water to leave him gasping on dry land. 

Hannibal Lecter is a terrible person. Will’s afraid of inheriting that out of a terrible want to be liked back. He wants to understand why he needs that, so he can leave it somewhere to be forgotten. Neglected things die. He can neglect this.

\---

As with most things these days, it begins with a conversation in Hannibal’s office.

Not recently, of course. Certainly not recently, because Hannibal hasn’t been around for a while at this point. But Will remembers this conversation as clearly as he remembers opening his eyes in the hospital, drains and gauze and the sourness of an open wound as strong as anything that his vivid imagination likes to conjure. 

Rewind a bit - lift Abigail Hobbs off the kitchen floor, fresh faced and wide eyed. Throw Alana back into the second floor of the townhouse. Slide the glass out of Jack Crawford’s neck, reconnecting vessels and muscle and the sinew of the trachea and esophagus. Uncarve the fatty skin of Mason Verger’s face. Give Margot Verger back her womb to decide if she wants anything to do with it. Give Abel Gideon a leg to stand on. Unsever Randall Tier's spine and jaw, remove ballistic shrapnel from Matthew Brown, stitch Beverly Katz back together with the delicacy of a painter restoring something cracked and beautiful. 

( _Please, that last one. Please do that and let it stick. That vivisection-retribution-inside joke is unfair - all the other dissemblances are collateral afterwards. Maybe everything turns out alright if you can undo this_ **_one_ ** _name on an increasingly long list of names. Maybe Hannibal just leaves you in prison, you bite your tongue off, you starve yourself, you don’t give him the satisfaction of your murderous intent, and you disappear into the smoke of the death penalty. “Presto!” cheers the overseeing officials and behold! Will Graham has vanished. Hannibal can’t appreciate you if you aren’t a monster, and you can’t appreciate him because he is, right?_ ) 

Will remembers it mostly because it wasn’t the usual time of day - an early return from looking over a crime scene in Iowa, already in Baltimore, _do-you-mind-if-we-meet-early_ stuttered through an abrupt phone call, and Hannibal, ever gracious, saying his only other patient for today left an hour ago and it’s only Will that’s left on the docket. He’s ushered in with the same “Come in, Will,” and smiling eyes that Hannibal turns on and off like a light switch. But that’s not right either, not really, because it’s more that Hannibal’s gaze is inexorably attached to something, always looking inward and outward alike for something that pleases him. Today Will’s company pleases him. Feeling that is enough for Will to feel calm for the moment, despite the different time, despite the different headspace. 

“Thank you for seeing me so quickly,” he says, passing through the door and watching the pillared mezzanine come into view with the same kind of relief he feels seeing the front of his farmhouse from around the bend in the driveway. “I know you said it wasn’t a problem, but I don’t want to make it a habit of showing up unannounced.” 

“You’re always welcome to show up when you'd like,” says Hannibal, and it’s always so disconcerting how deliberate he is, how both firmly and soft he presses the sole of his shoe into the floor to make metronomic steps. “I dare say my most enjoyable memories are impromptu.” 

The dark grey and red stripe of the curtains is warmed substantially by a sun just beginning to set outside, all golden and comfortable and sparking motes of dust in the light coming through the windows. The air’s a little chilly with late autumn air, and Will’s just beginning to truly feel the encephalitis coming home to coldly live in his bones in this memory, even if he doesn’t know it yet. He basks in the sunlight from the glass panes, wool jacket thrown over an arm, messenger bag limp on his shoulder. He thinks he stares into the light until he has to close them from the brightness of it, and the retinal burn shines from beneath his eyelids anyway. 

He’s like this for an uncomfortable stretch of time, but Hannibal never interrupts. When Will finally looks at him, the older man simply watches him, traces the outlines of the window, of Will’s airplane rumpled clothes, and shutters it somewhere in his mind’s eye. Will’s hands itch to sketch, and he tucks them into his trouser pockets and just smiles with a slight twist.

“Do you have a writer’s callus from drawing?” he asks, eyes searching the surface of the burlwood desk. Will doesn’t have to meet eyes if he’s observing. “I don’t," he explains, "but I feel the itch of one like it’s my own.”

If Hannibal is surprised by Will’s perception of his thoughts, he doesn’t show it. His smiling eyes move to an actual smile, rubbing his right hand’s thumb against the first joint of the ring finger. 

“How much of you do you feel is shaped from other people, Will?” he asks, like it isn’t the most needling way to begin today’s session. 

( _Today on “Useless Therapy That Fixes Nothing But Gives Me A Life Outside Work Sometimes”, we go over a lifetime of fear that you’re nothing but an amalgamation of other people’s thoughts, feelings, and compulsions, and that everything that you think is you is actually picking a trait at random out of a hat to feel like it belongs to you. Just add 2 parts water to 1 part social components, and you’ll have a person just in time for dinner!_ )

Will winces, and turns back to the yellow glow of the window sheers, and the shadow of the trees on the sidewalk outside. There’s a slight dusting of fuzz on the velvet of the curtain, powdery on the venous red. 

“An uncomfortable amount,” he says after a pause to measure the words. “Nature versus nurture suggests some of it comes naturally from my family and what I was exposed to as a kid. Parents, next of kin, role models and teachers.” He frowns. “Less research on hobbies and interests as an adult, since I don’t really have a social circle per se. I’d like to think I know what I like and why, but I haven’t looked into it critically.” 

“Fear of it not being quite so clear as you like to think?” asks Hannibal, gently prying. He hasn’t seated himself, hasn’t moved much at all, though his eyes are on Will’s shoulder, where the sun spills over it. 

“Fear of it being exceedingly clear, and the idea of Will Graham being exactly that. Someone I made up that I could like and other people might too.”

Hannibal cracks that same ring finger with his thumb at that, and seats himself in his armchair. “Why is anyone what they are with others? Why does anyone like anyone?” he asks, fingers folding elegantly into a lattice of veins and small scars. “There’s no determinable truth. We all make some conscious decisions of who we are to others. Finding someone who enjoys our company because of our presentation in public and in spite of the less savory reality running in the background is something mankind has struggled with I’d imagine since the concept of language came to be.” 

Will, taking in a moment’s more of the warmth, huffs a little before turning to his own usual armchair, jacket slung over the back of it. His bag hits the floor as gracelessly as a child’s backpack, and Hannibal only smiles again. Not the reaction Will is looking for, but always the one he gets. “Ah yes, the age-old popularity contest where you pick up hobbies to impress your crush or get the job.”

“Rumor has it learning acoustic guitar and listening to the Beach Boys are popular choices,” Hannibal snipes with good humor, and unfolds his hands. “Maybe volunteering with the food bank. Plenty of socially acceptable tropes. There’s somebody for everyone, or so I hear.” 

Will shrugs. “Anything to be more relatable to the person you think most about, I guess.”

And doesn’t that make the whole thing sound more high school, more civil, more casual and human. That doesn’t sound like considering the merits of a bolt-lock rifle versus a pump action shotgun for teaching teen-aged daughters how to hunt deer when not hunting undergraduate girls. That doesn’t sound like considering humidity and soil quality for chanterelles in the backwoods of state parks to best utilize adipose decay. That doesn’t sound like having to say out loud that the method used for cutting a grown man in half so that he could sit beside himself is wildly cruel and painful, while also secretly thinking to himself that it’s hilarious. 

( _See, you thought that was funny even before you knew who was responsible. So maybe you authentically like Hannibal Lecter, and you just wish you knew why without having to dig into it._ ) 

The two of them talk about nothing and everything. Those parts after don’t stick quite the same as the ones before. 

\---

Will thinks about that conversation a lot. 

He thinks about it in the depths of Baltimore State when he’s beginning to struggle with the memory of what sunlight should feel like in particular. Warm gazes to go with warm puddles of late afternoon, something that he’s forgetting in the pocked stone of his prison cell. Does he enjoy recalling this because he thinks Hannibal was being honest then? ( _You certainly were._ ) Or was he just cold and lonely and desperate for the idea of dust motes in golden light?  
  


( _“I'm trying to place myself somewhere in the frame of my mind and I have no bearings,” you rasp from between iron cage bars, a network of bolted ribs that protect you from the image of Alana and Hannibal just beyond them, and the sting of this reality. “No landmarks to tell me who I am.” You have the idea of the office, security, kinship, but it feels made up._ )

He thinks about it when he feels Randall Tier’s jawbone crack under a fist, thinking of his teeth being pushed back into the soft palate and bluntly parting the tissue of his throat, trachea, esophagus as Will drives it downward with the force of his hand. Is this justice that serves his and Jack Crawford’s agenda to get Hannibal to trust him? Or does he really just want Hannibal to like him, and this is his strumming at an acoustic guitar to get his attention? The result is the same, even if he does it for Jack or for Hannibal or for himself - he enjoys the whole thing immensely. 

He wants to wear Randall Tier’s skin like a pelt, string his molars on a fishing line for bait, make something more useful out of his animal dysphoria that so far has only been good for savaging people in the snow. How wasteful, how inaccurate to the truth of actual natural predators and their hungers, just a child’s understanding even when Will sees the master’s degree in paleontology next to his name on the suspect profile. 

( _“It was very intimate,” you say from across the expanse of the dining table. You kind of want to smile and laugh, and Hannibal will smile and laugh, and the whole thing will be revealed for the big farce that it is_.)

He questions his whole recollection of the thing when he convalesces in the ICU following his and Hannibal’s mutual betrayals, and Will’s subsequent gutting. After all, he starts filling the hours with idle talk with phantom teenagers, and that’s hardly the picture of great mental health. 

“They said it was surgical,” says Abigail.

Abigail Hobbs is a blue-eyed, doe-faced monster that is his only visitor that he cares to recall, as prim and impatient as she was in the atrium of the behavioral health retreat. He guesses she’s about as real to him as any other person he sees these days - she sits hunched with her arms crossed in the plastic chair near his bed, and they wordlessly laugh at the people who come to check in on Will, like these minor ministrations are somehow going to make him better. 

( _"Hope some of the other worlds are easier on me,” she adds, and you feel a creeping loss at the idea of college applications, happy parents, simple friendships. She is less of a daughter, and more a lost opportunity in the fluorescence of the hospital. She didn’t like you - still doesn’t probably, and you hope she liked her father despite everything so that there’s some kind of difference between him and you._ )

But even she only distracts from this gnawing thought. 

The memory again, critically: Hannibal wants to draw Will sunning himself, he wants to parry questions of why people like anything. At this time he’s deciding behind plaid suits, clandestine seizure induction, and dancing his merry way around the FBI if he likes Will, and if it’s possible for Will to like him, or at least be like him. He’s a complicated creature, and Will is a new terrain to understand and grow accustomed to. Will knows enough of Hannibal by this time that he can acknowledge that Hannibal wasn’t being unkind when he asked how much Will picks up on other people’s thoughts - it’s very like him to be genuinely curious when surprised. ( _“And you - you wanted to surprise me,” he said, and your weakened dry fingers drag along the wound dressings._ ) 

Will has grown into the habit of distrusting Hannibal for many good reasons, even when he’s being authentic. Maybe in this memory, Hannibal’s just feeling the edges of how much he can imprint on Will, and how much Will is aware of it. Maybe Hannibal is scanning for a seam to rip open and see how the inside of him is just random stratification of other people, and how he could use that to greater effect, like it’s raw pigments waiting for the painter’s oil. Cadmium. White Lead. Schloss Green. Poisonous things. 

The thought doesn’t really go anywhere, as thinking miserable thoughts often do. He tries to not think about it when he’s released to go home and oil boat parts like he isn’t planning how best to do an Atlantic crossing at the worst time of year because he’s lost the thread of the plot somewhere along the line. 

Even with his doubts of Hannibal’s intentions, Will still thinks about missed opportunities to be with Hannibal wherever he’s roosting these days, and why that is as disgusting as it feels. He tongues the regret of that, and the memory of Hannibal’s desire to draw him in the sunlight like a sore in his mouth, wringing cold hands with anger and with the oily slickness of chemical degreasers. 

\---

Abigail is in the barn, looking cold and glum behind him. She has stood with arms crossed for the majority of the morning while a flaky snow has fallen. The farmstead has the quiet of being alone in the woods, that crushing muteness that attacks every sound. The tools sliding against each other in his toolbox makes him chew the inside of his cheek, eyes sliding to billowing puffs of white breath coming from Abigail’s mouth. 

“We could just stay here, you know,” she says, watching Winston and Max mill around the edges of the barn door. They have muddy feet that darkens the snow. Beyond in the field, only the orange tip of Jack’s ear can be seen, his white body hidden in the gathering snowfall. The dog Jack. The Jack he consistently likes. ( _It’s always annoyed you, having to differentiate them -_ **_my_ ** _Jack, instead of Jack Crawford. The one that pushes your hands from your computer to pet his coarse haired head, to rub the tracks from the corner of his eyes. You toy with renaming him, but he knows it already, and his easy joy gives you a sense of shame trying to make him into something new._ ) “We don’t have to follow him anywhere if it makes you unhappy,” Abigail adds with the roll of a shoulder, strolling to the other side of the door, dogs following in her wake.  
  


Will, in a cold fingered grip, wields a screwdriver like he means to puncture the casing of the ship’s onboard engine. “With that kind of send off?” he frowns. “I’d be unhappy not congratulating him on a job well done.”

( _You’ve never felt so fucked up in your life. You didn’t know there were new lows to sink to, but you certainly do now._ ) 

She gives a crooked half-smile. “I guess he did kind of break us like a pair of champagne bottles before embarking. Spilled us everywhere for luck.” 

Will shakes his head. The casing slides into place, and he seals it shut. It’s a thought, off and on, usually at night while the scar tissue itches. He survived a traumatic event, and is left behind to tell the tale. There’s nothing to say he has to ever speak to Hannibal ever again. He can turn it into a horror story for trainees, make it an opening line to stop conversations with random people. 

“So say we stay here,” he replies. “What do we do?”

She scratches at Winston’s ears, who studiously looks out into the field, ignoring her. “Live, I guess. Don’t do what he wants. Isn’t that what they’re always telling you about negative people in group therapy? The best revenge is to live a good life. God knows that would annoy him more than anything else we could do. Might come back to finish the job, and save us the trouble of the passport fees.” 

He smiles, and pulls his hat down over his ears. They burn in the cold air. “I suppose his ego wouldn’t survive the indignity of being forgotten, after all the trouble he suffered to make a point,” he laughs a little, but goes quiet, listening to his own breathing. More puffs of air, more oppressive snowfall. “Don’t you want to know why he did it?” 

She shrugs, hair falling over the scar of her missing ear. The small bones of the auditory ossicle remain even if the delicate shell of the actual ear are gone - he wonders what people sound like through the armor of scar tissue, if maybe that’s where she can hear her own thoughts, or the sound of Hannibal’s voice overtaking them like Will’s have been.

“I know why he did it,” she says, matter of fact. “Even monsters don’t like to be embarrassed.” 

A human trait, being embarrassed. He didn't think Hannibal was capable of it - there's so little that shames him. Will sympathizes with it, and hates that he does. 

\---

There’s a hauling company, a dockmaster, and a fuel attendant between Will and the christening of his boat, NOLA. Nobody out of the three asks Will if he knows what he’s doing when he pushes off from the Washington Sailing Harbor in Arlington. He doesn’t know if he would do anything differently if they did. Nonetheless, he cracks a bottle of champagne on the side of it with a salute, a bitter smile, and the vision of red pooling everywhere in the narrow space between Hannibal's prep table and the wall. How terrible selling that house will be, how deeply the cleaners have to scrape the rust of Will Graham and Abigail Hobbs off of the expensive appliances and European tiles.

There’s an assumption in his head that he’ll push off directly into the ocean, some kind of Homerian figure heading into the Aegean looking for sea monsters and morals to the story, but the reality is he has to sail down the Potomac River into the Chesapeake Bay before he even can sight the actual Atlantic Ocean. It’s a cold day with prevailing east-blowing winds that make each tack of the sail burn his hands with frost. There’s at least four hours to the mouth of the bay, and another 5 to the sea, which will be unremarkable and boring from the deck of the boat. He could turn on the FM radio at the helm, but the fuzzy reverb of classic rock feels inappropriate. ( _“Rumor has it learning acoustic guitar and listening to the Beach Boys are popular choices,” Hannibal says, looking over your shoulder at -_ )

He could be on a weekend cruise for all the time he’ll have to think about whether or not this is a bad idea. It’s more akin to pushing off on a fishing trip with his father than it is a - Greek epic? Revenge story? Coming of age? 

What _is_ he doing?

But the muscle memory he has from his youth shrugs it off. He digs up the parts of him he’s pulled from Beau Graham in the South and the Great Lakes, and puts away other thoughts. Tree lined shores, private beaches, and shining white houses dot the lands he can see as he works his way south to pass crab boats, spinnaker pushed out and wide. Nobody to either side of him is the wiser. It’s just a grey day in February to them.

When the grey-green waters of the sea finally - finally - widen as he nears Virginia Beach, it’s no longer a question of what he’s doing, but how he’s going to do it. The current grows stronger, and the sails fill with wind. 

\---

Tonight, three days out to the northeast, the ship’s cabin is dark, and only dimly lit from the green lights of the onboard navigation. His fingers look waxy in it. There’s a winter gale outside, and it clouds the porthole windows with condensation from his own humid breath. 

“But you - you wanted to surprise me,” Hannibal whispers from behind him when he tries to lie down in the below deck bed. Abigail is between his arms, gouts of blood coating the sheets. Will thinks he feels a hand slide up into his gut, and look for things he’s made of. The fingers trace the common iliac artery and inferior vena cava. Sepsis follows for severing either. 

“They said it was surgical,” Abigail says around the ruins of her throat.

Will grits his teeth, stomach dropping out with the force of a wave, pulling a blanket over the mess to concentrate. The shadow of their heads persists in the folds of the fabric. They can’t both possibly fit on the narrow bed or inside him.

( _Yet here they are._ ) 

\---

The odds were good that he would make it, but the tall rock of Spain to the north and Portugal to the right is revelatory. 

Will is a miserable bastard with decent boating skills ( _fortunately_ ), a terrible attitude ( _unfortunately_ ), and a chip on his shoulder that needs filling, like it’s only a matter of finding the right shaped stone to repair it. The combination of these things and the prevailing westerlies of the upper Atlantic don’t quite make quick work of the two week voyage, but they do make crossing the Strait of Gibraltar feel like an accomplishment. His course for the Mediterranean is set. Italy, he figures, is a good place to find stones for carving. 

Italy, however, is not a good place for the kind of privacy needed to make honest assessments of himself. The lens of other people turns to him again when Hannibal leaves him a macabre note in the old stone and gold-leaf of the Cappella Palatina. He’s waited for days, walking the streets with tourists, hovering in the edges of the chapel. He rests in the bobbing ship at dock, and tires himself on the glares of the clergy, growing suspicious of him. His stomach twists the afternoon he sees police tape. At first he thinks _god damn it_ , when he’s called for questioning, but it transforms to wonder when he sees Hannibal’s new work in full as an investigator instead of a suspect. 

What kind of wild validation is that, to be right about what Hannibal thinks and where he is, even after everything that suggests he doesn’t know after all. It feels bad to be missed. It feels good to be missed. 

He looks at the photos and the imagined afterimage of the folded mass that was once a man and is now a heart, delicately peeled of flesh and mounted on swords. Will is flattered by it even if he is distrustful of it. 

It’s a note to him, but in talking with Rinaldo Pazzi, he wonders at how many notes Hannibal has written in his long career. Il Mostro, The Chesapeake Ripper, whatever he thought of himself as in Paris, and whatever he was before that. Who all gets the honor of an original piece, when they themselves are not the recipient and ingredients alike? _I contain multitudes_ , he thinks with a hooked smile, lying on the floor. 

Christ gazes blankly from above his head in thousands of pieces of tile. Near to a millennia of watching thoughtlessly down at the praying citizens of His city, blended in aesthetic and purpose with ancient Normandy, the Moorish style, Byzantine gold and glory. Will’s looked at the brochures in detail. He’s certainly had time to. He’s thought a lot about the little bisque shards, how they pull together to make the man above, and his surrounding disciples. Hearing the approach of Pazzi again, he thinks of Hannibal, watching from somewhere with equally kohl lined eyes, whites alive and pitiless. 

“Are you praying?” asks Pazzi.

“Hannibal doesn’t pray,” Will replies with a bland blink. Christ continues to watch. “But he believes in God. Intimately.” 

There’s a somewhat irritated pause. Will doesn’t bother to tilt his head to look. “I wasn’t asking Hannibal Lecter,” says Pazzi. 

Will sighs. 

( _What’s the difference? What pieces of porcelain did you break off that man to add to your own malleable clay? What parts did you like despite all the corruption throughout? What are you in the absence of him, if someone takes those pieces back? What if you just stayed home like Abigail asked? “Why does anybody like anybody?” asks Hannibal, and the sun is streaming in and warming your shoulder, and you’re thinking about -_ ) 

\---

Will flies to Vilnius, because he needs more context, and Hannibal doesn’t oblige this time. The concept of Hannibal as a young man sketching before La Primavera in the living memory of Pazzi gives way to the concept of Hannibal as a child, as a person coalescing in the heat of early traumas. Volcanic vents form relative to the force of their eruptions, and Will wants to see what makes the founding core of Hannibal’s, some waifish young person surviving life before adoption in a Soviet territory. Maybe there is a recognizable thing that justifies Will’s liking of the man that follows after. 

He stops by the marina at La Cala, where his sailboat sits largely nondescript in a line of sailboats, tied to the docks and ripe for abandonment. 

He passes the usual things on his way down to the shore line - petrol stations, fast food, Chinese takeout, an Apple store, families buying groceries, dogs lounging on the warm concrete and old stones of store fronts. He buys an adapter for his phone charger. He checks his bank accounts from an internet cafe. It’s unnaturally familiar to the tune of the locals talking, foreign songs on the radio station, having to think twice between buying bottled water and sorting out his handful of Euro bills. He hates how little regard it has for the surreal feeling in his feet walking down the lane. 

That’s not entirely fair, he shrugs. The world doesn’t revolve around him. People are living their lives in tandem with his disastrous wants and don’t bat an eyelash at his passing. 

He climbs onto the deck, into the cabin, and sits with the morning sunlight coming through the cabin entrance. With the porthole windows covered for his travel, the effect is rather like the catacombs in the chapel. Very well - that’s something he can work with. He sits facing the shadows of the starboard side, and tries to imagine Hannibal sitting on the green cushion of the bench there. That’s something Hannibal would do; climb into Will’s boat and wait, because Hannibal has never seen a conversation that he didn’t see an opportunity to make more painful.

Will’s hand drifts, tracing his scar, and how the nails can pull it apart if he tries hard enough. Abigail is gone. ( _She has been gone for awhile - it’s ok to say out loud._ ) Hannibal is also gone, no longer happy to remain once his message is received. 

The events from the day before are still feverishly hot to the touch. The catacombs as most old places have a particular kinetic absence, like the space has gone dead with its treasures. Will expected the treads of feet to be inescapably loud. He listened for clues of Hannibal’s presence other than that deep sense of knowing, the sound of leather brogues scuffing at limestone, or shiny jackboots clicking against small metal drains, but the thrum of his pulse and the clumsy sound of his breathing seemed to take up the entirety of the crypt. It was embarrassing. It was obvious in a way that Hannibal never really has to be, even when tousled and bloodied in the devastation next to his kitchen island. 

“I forgive you,” Will says, because that’s what’s on his mind, that’s the best bait to pull in that dark rock in his orbit. Will’s desire for Hannibal’s company says yes, it’s true, where the magnetic pull of the qualities that Hannibal has given him try to come back together with the original, and all the ones he had before that clutch to those because they are kin now. The thousand indignities he’s had to endure since being introduced to Hannibal says no, dig a pit, bury him in it, salt the ground that covers it. Deny yourself, let it go. 

Will left without a reply. The resentment and suspicion he feels in his retreat burns. He feels it in his cheeks, too long looking at the sun, reflecting off the ocean water. 

( _How laughable, how your one bad decision somehow invalidates the dozens Hannibal made for you to get to the point of embracing with hooked blades dead foster children between you. How heavy Hannibal weighs your trespasses, while expecting you to forget_ **_his_ ** _, and it doesn’t matter that you were both crying by the end of it and all you wanted to do was clutch back instead of go slack with pain._ ) 

Say something different, he commands himself now, looking at the bench in the cabin, a little threadbare and ugly in the mid-morning glow, willing the image of Hannibal in his enviable peace and bruised face to crease the cushions and become real. 

He takes a moment to try and make him real - what would Hannibal wear in Italy? White crisp shirt folded at the sleeves, dark blue slacks, maybe pushes his hair back the way he does in formal settings, but leaves the jacket behind. It’s not warm here now, but the wind is kind today, and he’s less memorable in a sea of other fashionable, business-like men. The warm orange-brown of leather derby shoes look crisp against the ugly marine carpet of the cabin interior, something grey-brown and touted as great for hiding stains from spills. He’s not even actually here, and Will is still embarrassed by the shabbiness of the surroundings to the vision he’s conjured. 

“Yes, Will?” Hannibal says, and clutches the curved knife in his folded hands, as at home there as a shiny gold watch. 

Forgiveness is the providence of good men, of which he is not. Will has no business offering it and Hannibal has no business accepting it, like it’s his due. Find a way to properly hate him that isn’t forged because that’s the correct answer. Punish him for killing Abigail with such ease when she thought so highly of him. Burrow his hand deeper into that lower abdominal incision, have him pull out the parts he wanted so Will can go back to something like normal and be lighter, and not need him anymore. 

Will opens his mouth to breathe a sigh, and closes it again. The boat bobs against the docks. 

“I had hoped for more than that,” says this not-Hannibal, ready to step out into the Sicilian streets, unstained and unbothered by the foreignness of it.

“I did too,” says Will, hands clasped around his own knife. 

He flies to Vilnius. The person to his left in the plane is a nuisance in that she is not Abigail or Hannibal and Will can’t transpose them onto her without feeling like a fraud.

\---

The tone for visiting Lithuania has a distinct theme. ( _As with any good composition this theme will repeat - you had better learn to like it._ ) This is what it sounds like: 

“This trigger has a three-pound pull. I am holding two of it.”

Will raises his arms higher at gunpoint, and contemplates if his curiosity is getting the better of him. 

\---

Enter Chiyoh, willowy and tailored into her lapelled coat like she has learned to live in it as Heracles does in the Nemean Lion’s pelt. 

By the very conspicuously chained entry gate, Will supposes it was naive of him to not expect her, or something like her. Movies make every abandoned property look like some grand spelunking adventure where the gang’s all here and the ghost stories are fake, but the reality he learned in the backwoods of the American South is that almost every home has a keeper, and the degree of crazy they’re willing to go to make trespassers feel unwelcome varies between shades of misanthropy and alcohol. When he spots the woman on the grounds gathering pheasants as easily as summer berries, he should have known to be more careful. Talent with a long barreled 22 caliber rifle requires discipline, not just aim. 

When he spots her again with that long barrel aimed at him, her prisoner piteously weeping in the background, he feels almost stupid with his presumption. It’s so obvious how Hannibal likes to seed his stomping grounds with damaged people. ( _“Hi!” you want to say. “You too?”_ )

The first thought that comes to Will’s mind when looking at Chiyoh up close for their first actual meeting is that she looks too young to be here. Slim, proper, smooth and as resolute as a jungle cat. She’s everything that Will would expect in a prodigy of Hannibal’s, maybe a shade of what he would have wanted out of Abigail if she hadn’t been a punishment for Will’s disobedience. She has a lean look, like her angular scapulae are dying to break the seams on the back of her coat, cut the cloth away and dart forward with her front-facing predator’s eyes that don’t leave Will’s face. 

Chiyoh is hard to talk to for a handful of reasons. She doesn’t emote much. She is distrustful. She leads conversations with the barrel of her rifle outdoors, and an animal’s skepticism indoors. There’s so much that he sees in her seclusion in the woods of the Lecter Estate as a parallel to his time before, in, and after prison that he can’t help but feel sorry for her, and it colors every response. 

( _“We could just stay here, you know,” Abigail says, and the dogs paw at the snow, and your fingers hurt from clutching the acrylic of your screwdriver for want of that simplicity._ ) 

Will allows that he should probably rag on her less about the emoting thing. Secluded in the woods for years and all that. Not a lot of time to dedicate to nuanced conversation, or interest in learning when the first person she’s probably seen on the property in years scaled the fence like he was planning on robbing the place. He can allow he’s the shady looking fucker in this scenario, even if he wishes she would put the big rifle away. She keeps the windows covered but wiped down. She keeps the yard overgrown, but paths wide and clean. Chiyoh’s a good steward of a broken place, and only leaves the unnecessary undone. 

Her home, it’s her home, he reminds himself. 

She looks great for someone that wasn’t expecting to manage a ( _new_ ) hostage. Daily routines are important for mental health, or something like that he’s read in a magazine, he guesses with a shrug. She learned it from someone, the ritual of putting on a daily mask. Maybe she used to be a great sparkling wit at all the parties. Maybe the young men in Paris or Rome where she no doubt met Hannibal turned their heads at her white-toothed smile and dark-eyed beauty. Hannibal’s _nakama_ , she calls him, urbane and educated, like Will should know that’s what he is and maybe he should, and be more in awe of her. 

“All sorrows can be borne when you put them in a story,” says Chiyoh, and Will bends his ear to listen. “Tell me a story.” 

\---

The tension doesn’t last long after that, just the awkwardness of introverts figuring out how to interact. She extends courtesy after dropping her weapon’s aim, like she’s remembered in hindsight where her manners are: “I suppose stories thrive in warmer places,” she mutters with a lowered gun.

Will smiles thinly, the careful one that he’s been cultivating for company, and hides his surprise. He half expected to be sleeping next to the prisoner tonight with one eye open. “I’m sure if nothing else it’s easier to hear a story without hauling a stock that large around and having to mind your three pounds of pull pressure.” 

“There’s nothing to say the gun stock and the pull pressure disappear indoors. Only that I need to be more careful not to put holes in the plaster.” She doesn’t quite shrug or smile, but he senses her amusement behind the hostility, rather like she’s cunning and feral. “I hope you enjoy pheasant.” 

“I am under the impression that by now you’re probably the expert in preparing pheasant, if your collection earlier this evening was anything to go by.” 

Turning away from him, ascending stairs to the courtyard where her tidy black work boots click against the stone, she does shrug this time. “It’s nothing.”

( _This will become a refrain - she says this often. It is a lie - it’s always quite a lot._ ) 

Will enters the solemn barrow that is the Lecter estate, and prepares for dinner because Chiyoh heretofore last-name-unknown is extending her hospitality despite him being a strange, white male in his mid to late 30s in the home of a single Asian woman living in a remote location in her mid to late 30s. Statistically speaking, odds aren’t in her favor. She should just shoot him. He has to hold his tongue to keep from saying that out loud, lecturing her the way he does some of his trainees, even if she **is** the one with the firearm.

Curiosity wins out, and she opens the door to the Lecter house the way someone shows an apartment they’re renting. Temporary. 

“You will have to forgive the simple fare,” she says, walking between the farm kitchen and the dining room, like she’s not quite sure what one should say and fills the gaps in conversation with quick, methodical movements. There are small down feathers that stick to her vest and coat, which she doesn’t remove even with the roaring fire, fingers harshly playing at removing the small barbs from the meat. Will doesn’t think that she’s cold, but instead wanting to be armored. “I do not have Hannibal’s talents.” 

The impression of her youth comes to him again, the roundness of her cheeks, a well loved child if a misplaced one. She can’t be much younger than him, really. The shape of someone else is in her bearing, more so than their mutual acquaintance that has trapped her here, even if she does have a similar talent for remaining unflustered with each small aggression Will throws out on the subject of Hannibal. 

It’s almost a relief - Will can’t conjure him here like he can in the catacombs or in the shadows of the boat. It’s strange to think there’s anywhere Hannibal cannot be. 

“Few do,” he replies, shaking his head, thinking of lomo saltado and his knuckles held softly in warm water. “Don’t know many who would want to,” Will adds, shrugging off his overcoat to sit awkwardly on the back of a pretty cane-back chair. 

“Any skill can be evil when wielded for evil reasons,” she replies easily, but uncomfortably, like there’s a stone in her mouth and she’s just trained herself to ignore it. “Eating is a necessity - is all food evil because one meal was?” 

“Oh, a few more than one,” Will adds glibly. Chiyoh cuts her gaze over to him and away, gliding to the kitchen again. Will wards off the feeling of being a burden, and the particular feeling of being young and poor and invited to dinner at the neighbor’s house.

Maybe covering for Hannibal’s faults gets tiring, even for - family? An ex-lover? A teacher? Maybe English is just tiring for her - he considers he’s the odd man out here, wielding the expectation of nuanced conversation from someone who neither has a need to practice speaking his language, and possibly no desire to. She’s not a travel agent, or god forbid a psychiatrist, accustomed to working with anglophones such as himself; she lives in the most rural area of a rural district of a fairly pastoral East Bloc country for christ’s sake. Will’s lucky she didn’t shrug at his explanations for trespassing and blow his head off.

Another thing he owes Hannibal, he supposes. The name offers safe passage even where it should invoke anger.

A braid of garlic is warm and fragrant in the light of the kitchen. No refrigerator he can see, and only the black oppressiveness of an old wood stove keeps her company. “Do you grow much out here?” he asks. 

“Things grow with or without me.” Chiyoh prepares a handful of vegetables with a single worn chef’s knife beyond his sight. Will envisions onion, white chunks of parsnip, butter hissing in a pan. “Fortunately potatoes and beets don’t require much assistance,” she adds. “I am more of a hunter than a farmer.”

“It’s a respectable vocation, if a little peculiar for a guard,” Will says, turning on a foot that’s heel glides across the blackened but waxed wood of the floor. “You seem the type that would prefer to wander.” 

“I have a duty,” she replies quietly.

He doesn’t hear any more, but he feels more - her turning closer to the stove, moving her eyes away, aligning the sharpness of a narrow cleaver knife to face away from herself. Her mouth is small and flat. Nobody likes their tender spots poked by strangers. Will used to avoid doing it. It’s one of those qualities people don’t particularly like. It’s not part of his public face, but most of that face has been excised like dead tissue these days. 

It’s a relief to have the lull in conversation for a moment to realign and reevaluate. Will finds his eyes wandering the walls away from her hunched back. It’s a more telling picture than his impressions of her personally - he’s always preferred to work with direct evidence.

The kitchen is small but comfortable, and Chiyoh’s thin arms reach with ease for things without looking. It is not tidy, even if it is clean enough to cook a meal in without getting a handful of feathers with supper. It’s purposeful, but not a favorite place to be. There is no art or music other than the rhythm of her hands working over the food. 

The dining room has all the hallmarks of an old European noble’s house, but so too does he see small modifications made by its keeper. Fabric tapestries unfurled over the lamps show her game birds, bright and beautiful in a way that removes the reality of slaughtering them day to day. The real incongruous element is the additional Asian kitsch - folding screens with falcons, dark-stained wood bowls, an assortment of oriental statuettes, oddities like that. It feels like a collection of tourist import novelties. Everything is in the correct place, but something about the quality is lacking despite the grand setting. Polyester fabrics, uneven varnishes, lacking identity, grabbing for familiar things. He can see she knows what she wants, but maybe doesn’t have access to the original. 

That makes sense, he guesses - this is a remote part of the world for someone to find themselves in. She’s made a facsimile that seems right, if a bit off. So she doesn’t want to wander off - she wants to go home. 

( _You know what that’s like._ ) 

The pan lifts from the wood-fire stove just beyond the doorway with a clang, and he finds himself drifting to the roaring hearth away from it, where one thing does stand out, more real than the others. 

The vermillion red of a small arch over the mantel of the fireplace doesn’t fit the scene at first glance. Symmetrical wood about a half-meter wide like a gate opening stands over the whiteness of two glazed white figures, pheasant feathers, and fruit, with candles flanking on either side. This thing is real in a different way. Food for the spirit, gifts from a kill, things needed to commune to receive blessings. 

Of course he understands the concept of shrines and altars - it’s a necessity in his field. Humans are in the habit of centering their obsessions, and serial killers are canonically famous for it. Sometimes it’s just photos hidden in a shoebox, or a favorite corner of the garden where something formative happens. The dining room table with memento mori scattered in the centerpiece. Their very own trophy cabinet with all the things they value, a testament to their own greatness. ( _Serial killers are so very often their own small gods. Hannibal is one of them - you offered him the meat of Randall Tier with a different name. Maybe this is the cause of the misfortune visited on you. You shouldn’t lie to gods, even if they_ are _small._ ) He recognizes the shape and intent, if not the meaning. Who and where do you pray to when you have no church or god other than the ritual of feeding bones to an old man in the root cellar? 

Will steps towards the hearth, but he doesn’t get the chance to get closer before Chiyoh slides in the room using the family’s bone china with a careful but casual regard for it. It’s something meant to be used. She doesn’t hesitate to do so. 

If she notes his pointed gaze to her shrine, she ignores it. 

\---

The meal is awkward the same way settling into normal conversation was awkward, because Will can’t stop himself from being condescending, and Chiyoh rightfully can’t stop finding opportunities to throw him off his officious tangents. For someone above Hannibal’s verbal traps, Will seems to spend a lot of time setting them. She catches him sometimes through the main course, when his eyes drift again to her pretty red arch, to the pretty little offerings beneath it. She wants to distract him from it. 

“Hannibal took someone from you,” she says. “Are you here to take someone from him?”

Cutlery in hand, Will pauses, and looks away from the hearth. He keeps his face still, but very nearly laughs. 

He considered it. He considered whatever it is that Hannibal loves most that could be burned like trash. Chisel the tiles from the floor of the Palatina. Set fire to the Uffizi Gallery. Remove the cornerstone of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Take all the fine things that he held sacred in his house and throw them into the streets of Baltimore to be scalped and sold in pawn shops and flea markets. He had sat in the forensics-stripped kitchen tracing the surfaces with his eyes until Alana comes calling for him, and Will didn’t have the grace to bow out of that space like it didn’t matter. It does. His and Abigail’s blood is imprinted all over it.

All those material things, and the effect they’d have on Hannibal, matter more to Will than any of those things actually matter to Hannibal. He couldn’t fathom a place or a person that Hannibal loves - only things, and he’s come to know the other man doesn’t care much about those either when push comes to shove. He can’t fathom a person that loves Hannibal either. 

( _“Why does anyone like anyone?” asks Hannibal, and you don’t know, and you hate not knowing anything, and the sun is streaming in and warming your shoulder, and you’re thinking about -_ ) 

“I don’t know what I would take from him,” he says. He tries not to look too long. The fire crackles to their sides, and Will sucks on his tongue. “Besides, I've forgiven him his trespasses, as he's forgiven me,” he says. 

“You're _nakama_ ,” she adds, as if the word should stick from the first time. She expects recognition of the importance of it. It conjures an image of intimacy that Will associates with bandaging his hands, and the gentle burn of rubbing alcohol. ( _“Stay here with me,” Hannibal demands quietly._ ) She presses forward. “Aren't you alike?”

He chews. He considers his fork in the left hand, knife on the right, how it mounts dinner to the tines in tidy bites. He considered how long it would take to subdue the woman across from him, if her rifleman’s shoulders have made her arms sinewy, if it will be hard to joint her like a lamb. Does she need acid and oil to break down to tenderness? Does Chiyoh know what it is to be tender, two decades alone in the woods? 

“If I were like Hannibal,” he says, “I would've killed you already. Cooked you,” another pause, “ate you, and fed what was left of you to him. It's what he would do.”

“You’ve given that some thought,” she says wryly, like she’s caught him doing something regrettable. He adds another comment to the running profile in his head: righteous, fault finding. She doesn’t want to trust him, even if she’s likely lonely and curious. She’s a smart girl. 

Will blinks. “Do you know where he is?” he asks, as if he doesn’t know the answer. It’s another thing he’s given some thought to.

“Why are you looking for him, after he left you with a smile?” she asks in turn, sharp-mouthed as though she lined it with hooks. It’s a fair question. Truth be told, Will wishes he understood why he wants that too. 

He tells her he understands himself better when around Hannibal. That’s only true in that Will has to acknowledge he doesn’t actually know himself very well these days. The absence of the other man leaves a void, like he ripped half the pages from a book on the way out, and Will only occasionally finds one of the missing chapters hidden somewhere uncomfortable. 

\---

Chiyoh becomes truly real to him only once she has suffered. It doesn’t matter that she made a perfectly acceptable dinner, or told him totally acceptable histories for her service to this place. She can only become a person once she has something to regret. He thinks that maybe that’s a practice he’s beginning to share with Hannibal. While pulling old vintages from the cellar stacks, he tries not to feel guilt. It doesn’t work, so he falls back on things he knows make him feel better - namely alcohol. 

_Lecter Dvaras_ , reads a label.

Will opens his knife and pulls the cork from the green glass bottle, admiring the snake and the two crows of the seal sitting close statant at its peak. It’s the kind of thing he imagines Hannibal would enjoy using were it not for the history of it. The cork releases easily, and he passes the bottle to Chiyoh, who still is looking shocked and baleful from the ground. He can’t really blame her. He supposes most things that have gone wrong for her recently are his fault.

The decision to sabotage the prisoner’s cage is impulsive. Watching the man flee into the dark of the bordering woods on the property had felt like letting a paper boat float off. A good deed, maybe. If Chiyoh woke and there was no man to tend to, wouldn’t that be kinder? Couldn’t she just leave?

( _Could she really? Don’t child eaters deserve to rot? Do they deserve the certainty of death, or the right to defend themselves against a one time well-meaning but manipulated child herself? Even the old you would say no_ . _His naked form disappearing behind a hedge of elderflower is a gross miscarriage of justice, and you defend it as taking another win from a man who’s clearly done his best to forget that he ever set up this game to begin with._ )

Watching the prisoner return for Chiyoh felt instead like a mistake, even when Will knew - _Will knew_ \- he would do it. The terror in her round face is striking and all that Will really sees in it is her need to be anywhere else, like Abigail’s in between Garrett Jacob Hobbs’ hands. 

She’ll survive it - she does, because she is a distrustful woman, and she has good instincts, if not the abundance of violence that Will and Hannibal do. Will comes back to save her, only for her to have saved herself. Little chicken bones stand between her and death, one large one protruding rather rudely from the prisoner’s neck on the ground. He wants to congratulate her on a job well done, on the sad corpse of a man bleeding out at their feet.

“You have a lot of faith in righteousness,” says Chiyoh, fingers tight in her lap. 

“I have faith in three pounds of trigger pressure,” he replies, staring at the growing pool of blood coming from the dead man’s neck. “I had hoped he wouldn’t come back, and I wouldn’t need to.” 

“The way you shouldn’t have come back for Hannibal?” she seethes. 

( _“We could just stay here, you know,” Abigail says, and you’re tempted._ )

“Your entire life is developed around his test, whether or not the story behind it is real,” Will drawls between sips of acid white wine - it’s chilled with the damp of the cellar, but not so cold that it doesn’t bring to mind bile and the memory of Abigail’s ear fighting it’s way up. “Doesn’t that ever bother you? Wouldn’t you want revenge, or at least to be free?”

“Why does it bother _you_?” she replies, and takes the bottle back in gloved hands. “I took my post willingly. The details are inconsequential to others. It was an honorable charge, a blood pact.”

“The details aren’t inconsequential if the truth changes your choice. Hannibal likes to make you feel like what he wants is the only thing you can do, but you realize that’s not the truth, right? Think of the time wasted, all the chances you had to just go home.”

Something in her face is hurt before it becomes concrete. He’s said the wrong thing. “I owed the responsibility to the Lecter family, for my Lady Murasaki’s niece who did not grow up to be anything but a bad memory.” Another burning sip of wine, and she coughs around it, like someone unaccustomed to drinking. “Hannibal set the terms, but it is to her and my lady that loyalty is given. I am home where she is honored.”

Murasaki. 

Hannibal has mentioned his aunt before but never in any detail, always in passing like a teacher in boarding school, or a well-liked colleague. Murasaki, who’s smattering of possessions came to rest in Hannibal’s house where he hoards them like gold, and that, more than anything, marks some level of importance. Here in the hall is the ukiyo-e prints of Edo-period Izumo, here in the kitchen is a Yanagiba sashimi knife with an ebony handle, here in the bedroom, only ever glanced from afar by Will, is a family relic of armor and sword. She’s present and unpresent, which Will takes to mean dead but enshrined the way Chiyoh’s fruits and candles and pheasant feathers are. 

Chiyoh makes more sense in that light. Maybe a relative of Hannibal’s adoptive aunt, someone that would have known him before he was the Monster of Florence. Someone Hannibal would know well enough to cut his teeth for manipulation with, rather than a victim of chance. Something useful and familiar to be put away safely until needed, or evolved as Hannibal has shown a devout dedication to sowing in people he decides to like.

Chiyoh stands, turning away from him. Will looks away too. 

( _Sorry, you would have never left here, you think. She’s free to go, the finest curse anyone has ever placed on either of you._ ) 

She idles for a time by the racks of wine, studiously looking away from the man on the floor, how he spreads around the stonework in vivid black-red. Thin with neglect, he thinks, and considers what she would look like in a warmer place, where she can have real things the way her shrine is real. He feels her resentment like a shawl. 

“I will help you find him,” she says quietly, considering her rifle. “Or at least something of him.” She has tiny fingers that clutch at it, and for a wild moment, Will hopes she’ll turn it at him and simply pull those three pounds of pressure. 

He considers her, the long line of her frame, the smouldering resentment that hides in her frownless face. “Why would you help me?” 

“I have no reason to stay here now,” she says, and is smooth as a glass surface. “The charge is filled. You saw to that.” Her wet cheeks are reflective in the candlelight - he thinks she’s very beautiful, the way that Will Graham thinks that damaged things are beautiful. 

Will wishes his face could be as untroubled as hers. He sighs in exhaustion when she passes with her pretty wood-stock rifle, polished so ritually that it gleams in the dark. What a dutiful child she has grown to be, how careful she is with the things and friendships that she treasures. He feels sorry for her, and how little repayment she is given for her faith. 

\---

Chiyoh’s not quite so cruel as to insist that Will leaves even if it would be deserved, but whatever comforts she might have offered like her pheasant dinner and country vegetables dries up after she quietly cries from narrowly avoiding death. She should have drank more. Will should have drank more too. 

He prepares for a long night, looking down an open hall. His hands are stiff, and the decades old cushions on an old settee do not a bed make for a man accustomed to hurts and pains. His palms are raw from breaking bottle after bottle to make her prisoner into something new, lifting deadweight. He feels a debt is owed, that he should make it beautiful after so many years of ugliness. He always thought creating purpose from death would yield satisfaction - after all, look at the Chesapeake Ripper’s humour scattered across the eastern seaboard. Should there not be laughter? Should there not be beauty? 

( _No audience to see, no foolish, oracular men to explain in hindsight what’s left behind. Only you, performing in the dark to a theatre of chicken and pheasant bones and snails, because no matter her relation to Hannibal, Chiyoh doesn’t have an appetite for_ **_this_ ** _kind of shrine._ ) 

Most of the windows in the house have long been covered in muslin linen, and at best Will catches the glow of the moon through them like a street light from at the end of a long road. He turns on his side to stare at one, and try to imagine away the shadows at their edges and the fireflies beyond them. Still, no Hannibal tonight to reach inside and pull his insides apart. No Abigail either, nestled next to him, irrevocably dead in Baltimore, in the barn with the dogs ignoring Will’s projection, and again in Palermo. It’s lonely, sleeping with only his own thoughts. 

When Will’s honest with himself, he can admit there’s no reason for him to be here. Chiyoh offered her assistance in finding her erstwhile house scion, but Will already knows where Hannibal is, the way he knows where his scars are. The problem is unlike his scars, he doesn’t feel any clearer to understanding him than he did in the catacombs. He knows where Hannibal is, but not who, not really. He might as well have apologized to a stranger, or an empty room, some unfeeling shadow that neither accepts or denies.

The simple solution is to kill him, but his sense of purpose recoils from that. He thinks he wants to go back to the barn and start over, or to run away before his warning call to Hannibal could become a warning sign for him, but he doesn’t know if that’s the easier answer or a harder one. He wants to be liked, but he wants to burn things down, pull skin back, extract teeth, secrets, emotional dolorous blows - everything is fair game. 

It would feel good to do _something_. 

He doesn't, because something has to still be standing when the feeling passes, and no one deserves for him to happen to them, save maybe Hannibal. The Lecter household creaks in the night, Chiyoh rests unshackled somewhere in the depths of it, and a man hangs transformed in the unseen reaches of its masonry. ( _That will have to suffice._ ) Will closes his eyes, ignores his chilled feet and legs, and listens to the woods outside.

\---

Chiyoh wakes him, not ungently, but also with the same tenacious purpose he sees in how she chops vegetables and raises her rifle daily. Her face is dry and clean in the light, and Will can’t picture tears on them the way they were so obvious and elegant the night before. He wonders if she would cry if she returned to the cellar and see what he’s made of her kill. 

“Long nights make for hard mornings, but there are things to be done today before we can leave this place,” she says, buttoned up tight in another vest and long sweater. Her face is unreadable, freshly washed and made up. 

“Still willing to help me find Hannibal?” he asks groggily. He’s surprised to have slept at all, but sure enough, mid-morning glows from the windows where the sun has risen. There is a haze of stirred dust in a strip of unfiltered light, blanching the wood floor beneath it. 

“Parts of him, if not him entirely in due time,” she replies with a glance out to the windows. “I cannot answer all your questions, but I know someone wiser than I who can." She pauses, mouth turning into a frown. “We’ll need to fly to where we’re going,” she adds, the way someone describes the walk to the gallows, or an unsavory smell. 

Really, that’s the best Will can ask for, considering the circumstances. ( _You saved her time, and took more for yourself - how lucky._ ) A delay. More context. An excuse to put off trying to put a knife in Hannibal the way he knew how to put one in him. He sits up, and stretches his legs out in front of him while Chiyoh watches him. “Where are we going?” he asks, and tries to be brave in the face of his intense desire to go home. 

“To Lady Murasaki,” she says, and strolls off, like that’s all the answer he needs. Maybe it’s all the answer she can afford in the face of leaving for the first time in 25 years. Her little narrow heeled boots click in her retreat with haste. She has things to attend to. He can respect that, the way he can respect watching the Chesapeake Bay disappear behind him, white sail pushing eastward. 

The settee beneath him is an unmemorable dusty blue in the sunlight, firm and flat, no softer than when he started. He stretches his stiff shoulders, swallowing back pain with each crack and sharp ache in his back and gut and tries not to hate it as weakness - he's heard scars are evidence that the past was real, Will thinks with a smile. He laughs a little at that, irritated at his own assumptions, watching Chiyoh retreat into the heart of the house.

Where does any unhappy child away from home go when they’re alone, or without purpose, or burnt out with their job or their friends or their lovers?

Back to something familiar, of course. 

( _So not enshrined, simply estranged, that revered Aunt Murasaki you never see but sense like something missing in a set._ )


	2. 行 - gyō - fabrications

Could it be that hard

To hear a bee struggling

In a washbucket?

Shouldn’t it actually

Be harder not to hear?

\---

The dining room mantel is empty when Will ambles his way in from the empty side of the house. The little offerings are gone, the candles burnt down low, and Chiyoh is carefully taking the figurines and wrapping them in small linen handkerchiefs that find their way to a satchel at her side. They are nestled in next to some documents and a few books - **_Madame Bovary_ **, cursive script shining from the red linen and gold flake, as well as some tired paperbacks with flaking spines that he can’t read. Well loved and used. 

“Gathering things?” he asks. 

Chiyoh, still folding fabric in neat triangles, only looks over her shoulder before nodding. “Only a few important ones,” she replies, and stuffs the bundle into the folds of canvas and papers. “There’s hardly time to ship more, and it is not so important. Though I wonder what impression I left on you to think I don’t have anything of my own. I’ve spent more than half my life here.”

Will considers that, the long years she’s said she’s been here as a mutual prisoner of the man in the cellar. She’s reached a level of isolation that he would have envied at one point in his life. No one to cater to, so not a lot of finery. No one to dress up for, so not a lot of clothes. She keeps books maybe, hiking boots, well-made everyday items. The areas of the house she inhabits are alive, but all the rest of the property is dead with disuse. He wishes he could see her room, and what she makes her daily den. 

( _Half of identifying and naming a species is seeing how it lives and how long._ ) 

“How old were you when Hannibal left you here to make your decision?” he asks after some length of time, almost hesitant to know.

“Sixteen, nearly seventeen,” says Chiyoh with a thin smile.

“You were more of a child then than an adult,” Will sighs, frustrated. He thinks on the figure of yet another teenaged girl handed options they don’t know how to handle. At least Hannibal is consistent. 

“The decision wasn’t hard to make, and I’ve had time to come to terms with it. Everything seems reasonable when you are angry the way that young people are often angry, and by the time the anger fades, it becomes tradition,” Chiyoh shrugs. “Hannibal was a child when his anger first found him. I suspect it took longer for his to recede into something familiar.” 

“And look how he turned out,” Will drawls, eying the emptiness above the fireplace. 

She hums. “Do you think I didn’t turn out?” she asks. 

The satchel closes under her small hands, and with it goes Chiyoh’s meager few possessions. She continues through the house, checking drawers, sealing shut cabinets and windowsills and clearing surfaces. She sweeps and wipes her workplaces clean. It’s a lot of work, getting ready to leave home, and they still must stay another night once they confirm their transit in the nearby town. 

Will doesn’t answer, not willing to start the day on further rudenesses. 

( _It’s not that you think that she didn’t turn out - it’s that you’re not convinced she’s something complete to begin with, like she’s you before killing Hobbs, wearing a shell, and you just don’t know what shape her seven dogs, farmhouse, and fishing creek takes because she hides them._ ) 

\---

Not everyone in Will’s life is necessarily wrapped up in murder. ( _At least not directly or to your knowledge, you think. Some of them are merely ambivalent to your existence, living very normal, enviable lives. You’re sure some of them will go on to kill spouses and suspects, because statistics for Americans are just skewed like that._ ) While it seems easily forgotten in the drama of life before and after Hannibal Lecter, there’s an entire world of people that Will has to interact with despite his aversion to interacting with people.

There’s an older lady at the grocery store that is both cashier and cart pusher in Wolf Trap that comments on when he lets his hair grow too long. There’s Carl and Arash, the gas station clerks that Will consistently sees when paying out cash for a fill up and make sure that he knows the road conditions going out to Quantico in the mornings. _(“Necessities in cash,” says daddy, tapping a cigarette out of a carton, and you, nodding. “Ain’t got no business usin’ credit for things y’need.”_ )

The neighbors, the Harrisons, an elderly couple with a prodigious annual watermelon crop and well-tended flowering crepe myrtles at the front of their drive, are who he leaves the dogs with often - they have two golden retrievers who enjoy the company, and they, childless, scratch ears and give treats with loving hands. Will befriends them in his usual shallow way a year after he moves into the house when they come by with a cobbler and small peanut butter balls for the dogs as a thank you. He had returned one of their dogs to them the day before, and the Harrisons insist on introductions all around. He only had Buster and Max in those days, but with each additional dog, so too are there additional peanut butter balls. Will doesn’t know them closely, but he reckons he would kill someone for them in exchange for their benign attention if push came to shove. He doesn’t experience much shame when he thinks about that. 

There are others that he keeps superficial contact with, because when he goes weeks at a time during summer and winter breaks without talking to people, he gets antsy to put a face to humanity again. Some eventually are discarded, either when Will grows uncomfortable with how he sees them, or they grow uncomfortable with how much Will sees in such short bursts of time. Recently, he’s consciously stopped considering Alana to be part of this societal Kingdom Animalia. Will can’t quite come to terms with her role in his life, both as an ally and an antagonist. This makes her fall into his time-honored habit of avoiding lasting impressions of his fellow employees and students, not out of spite as much as the high probability he’ll do the wrong thing. 

The feeling is mutual with most of the teaching staff.

An explanation: 

It starts with harmless tradition, when the prospective and new agents toy with fake code names in their first couple years. Who’s the next _April Fool_ or _Deep Throat_ or _The Guru_? It’s all speculation, just meant to be funny - a very mild kind of hazing at worst. Nobody uses them with any regularity, but it's a getting-to-know-you conversation that inevitably crops up. They get tossed around as cubicle talk in email chains, group chats, and references for birthday reminders.

Alana sports the charming title of _Hedy_ by her occasional students, of Hedy Lamarr fame for her dark tresses, blue eyes, and uncanny ability to slide out of love confessions from young bucks like its a Soviet Era escape technique. ( _Hindsight tells you she is not that good at it when it matters, like significance takes her by surprise._ ) 

Zeller and Price are _Frick and Frack_. It’s mostly Price’s fault - Zeller didn’t even recognize the reference. 

Beverly Katz is _Aki_ , because half of the FBI are aging white men who have only seen Asian women in James Bond films, and she’s already a spy, and originality is scarce even in the top tiers of law enforcement. She would roll her eyes. “I’m Korean for god’s sake,” she huffed over reports, when asked. 

_Captain Obvious,_ which Will secretly guns for at first, because _of course_ , is saved for David Melendez in the crime scene photography courses, which Will thinks robs him of a perfectly respectable and recognizable name. The adjunct instructor’s tendency to remark on things so painfully apparent that it hurts to hear it reiterated auditorily is legendary, so, _fair enough_ , but Will soon earns a replacement epithet of his own in the form of _Lee Harvey Oswald_. 

The running joke starts at his failed FBI agent test, which finds its results put into popular circulation by trainees every year - he scores 9 points shy on his mental evaluation, the way that the Cold War assassin scores 9 points shy of being designated a sharpshooter. “Oh, like Lee Harvey Oswald!” says Paul in the Organized Crime team. “Whaddya think of that?” says Peter Svensen in Narcotics with a guffaw, like it’s all very clever. It sticks - not because Will is from New Orleans like his namesake, or that he’s the one-man forensics equivalent of working in radar operations like his namesake, but because despite being 9 points shy of being a federally recognized agent, everyone is relatively confident he’s still going to blow someone’s head off. Like his namesake. “Don’t send him to Dallas with Crawford,” says Annie Guilford in Trafficking, and by then Will realizes it really has made the rounds, and this is a _thing_. 

Haha, very funny, he smiles at office potlucks and holidays. Will’s not sure if it’s ever used to scare people off from his classes, or influences board of directors decisions, or kept him from making friends that can’t differentiate a joke in poor taste from an actual human being, but it follows him around when someone with enough tenure gets brave and brings it up again. Alana avoids it. Zeller mentions it once, but the lecture Crawford gives him afterwards assures it never leaves his mouth in the lab ever again. 

( _Nobody says it when you come back from the mental hospital, too afraid or tongue-tied to risk falling into that awkward parallel. Self-fulfilling prophecies, you singsong to yourself, shuffling folders on your desk while thinking of ways you can blow your psychiatrist’s smile right off his smug, angular face._ ) 

There’s a woman named Tracy in HR at Quantico who’s the last he remembers using it. Unremarkable, he recalls, just a brown haired bob cut, standard ladies’ business attire, and typically matronly makeup. She wears bright blue acrylic framed glasses to make up for it. _Oh you know, Tracy with the glasses_ , they say. She is independently responsible for arranging all business related trips for the school, and on occasion for FBI affiliated projects. Will is fond of Tracy - she keeps a laminated paper color coded by airline with frequent flyer numbers for each faculty member. Will is partial to window seats. Tracy always remembers. 

“Where to this time, Oswald?” she asks in an off-handed casualness that Will almost has to stop and congratulate her on. Everyone else likes they’re pulling a fast one on him, whereas Tracy uses blunt fingernails to type out notes with boredom, gold eyeglass chain glinting from the corners of her boring haircut. “How’d you get that name, anyhow?” she adds, turning to favor him with a raised brow. 

“I’m fun at parties and parades,” he says with a made-up grin, blue-green eyes putting out his best charms and she laughs. 

( _You don’t survive a career in law enforcement with thoughtless people without learning to let bad jokes slide in one ear and out the other, even if you hate it. Even if you don’t like anyone_.) 

Now, in the small white office of a travel agent’s office in Utena, Lithuania, Will finds he misses Tracy, disregard for co-workers being people or no. He’ll trade for the bad nickname over the strangeness of scrambling through old emails, looking for affiliated airlines while the blonde haired woman introduced only as Lina clicks away at a laptop, his passport, drivers license, and credit card in hand. Chiyoh is outside, already done, and ready to leave and continue her sorting back at the manor. He tries to wave her off, but she stands at the office entrance with the stoic posture of a guard. 

The screen facing him, that she asks him to confirm the information on with clipped English, shows **_VNO > HEL > HND_ ** with a kind of bold obscurity that Will almost laughs at it - he reads it as a layover in Hell, and thinks that seems appropriate. 

Lina with the blonde hair and clipped English that he will not see again smiles politely. “Have a good trip to Tokyo, Mr. Graham,” she says, and hands him a binder of receipts, customs declarations, and photocopies of promotions for their firm. “Mind that you leave before 3 am to Vilnius - you will miss your first destination if you don’t.”

_Thank you_ , he thinks. _I would hate to miss the trip to Hell._

\---

The ceiling paint covering the raised anaglypta of the Lecter manor is peeling. 

Will knows it is significantly so, because it is midnight in perfect darkness save the moon’s glow outside, and he can still see shreds preparing to fall in the black of the parlor. He can’t sleep, and this is what he has to center himself on, so as of this moment in time, he would consider himself the world’s foremost expert on thinking about this instead of the pit of dread in his stomach which is widening with small fingers.

Travel anxiety is something Will thought he left behind in his youth. He has travelled extensively as a kid, in his college years, and in his career, moving from one disaster to the next. He has left at cracks of dawn, at midnight, and every hour falling in between. If the airport is open, Will has probably booked a flight for all the times available. If the car makes a better coach, he drives. If he needs two to three weeks to decide if he’s doing the right thing, he apparently sails across the literal ocean, and there’s some things to unpack there. 

So, travel. Generally comfortable with it. 

He rarely travels for himself - either it’s to start over after Beau Graham runs out on a job or a warrant, a seminar in support of his research, or a middle to lower income family’s tragedy unwinding in some small town at the hands of the terminally destructive. He’s kept a full schedule, and that makes staying in Wolf Trap behind the sheltering wall of trees and shrubs that separate his house from the country service road all the more appealing. The obligatory holiday drives to Georgia to see his father are inevitable, but even that is rare. Trips to the Caribbean are for people who enjoy Mai Tais, human contact, and summer heat, and Will’s always been more of a cold weather guy alone in the woods. 

Vacations are for people with work-life balances. ( _Your balance in work and in life is prolifically uneven._ ) 

The trouble with all this impersonal travel he is accustomed to is two-fold: he doesn’t know how to enjoy travel without strict guidelines, but mostly, he’s not left the country before fixing the boat. Will Graham ashamedly joins the 40 percent of Americans that have never left their native soil. Going on a Trans-Atlantic trip is not just crazy in that he’s never done an ocean crossing while sailing, but that he’s never done an ocean crossing by any other form of transportation either. 

Two countries within a couple weeks of each other have already been mentally tiring, and that’s if he ignores a layover in Frankfurt, or speaking with the Spanish authorities when he crosses into the Mediterranean. The familiarity of water takes the surreality of it away, like he’s just in the Florida Keys, or in the vastness of Lake Superior, but where he docks is a new land entirely. 

So Japan next, assuming Will ignores Finland, in what will make the longest flight he has ever been on, with the longest layover he’s ever dealt with, and in the company of someone who’s aimed a gun at him on at least two occasions in recent recall. Perfect. Nothing to get stressed out about, right?

The raised tin-plates of the ceiling glare down at him in the dark with their strips of plaster and paint. He lies still on the settee, metal cushion coils pushing into his sore back. He listens to crickets and the sound of rustling tree branches, and the occasional dark tidings of an owl. Sleep evades him while he listens to his heart go between calm and the fluttering of overthinking. Underneath a musty blanket that Chiyoh offers him before disappearing again for the night, Abigail tucks her head underneath his sternum, wormed up into his chest, and talks of visiting colleges, and the one time she crosses the border into Canada. 

“Winnipeg’s nice,” she whispers. “The main hall looked like a castle. Bigger than here, probably closer to what I thought Hannibal’s family house would look like. They had grapes on the college seal.” 

Her hand is in his gut-wound like it’s a handle, so she can hold on to his attention a little longer. Will lets her distract him, guiltily relieved for her presence even with the knowledge of her death. He doesn’t know if she ever left the country either - he likes to think she did, that she had something he didn’t before everything went pear-shaped. 

\--- 

Two in the morning arrives looking a lot like the five hours preceding it, staring into the dark. He hears the alarm on his cellphone go off next to his head, and if he squints past the grey noise of his terrible night vision, he can see the suggestion of warm, yellow lamplight from down the hall where Chiyoh is beginning to prepare. Will stands, shrugs on his coat and glasses from the breast pocket, and pulls his duffel from beneath the settee. 

He contemplates flipping the furniture off for additional effect, but he supposes it’s better than making the hour walk each night to the nearby town to catch a cab to a hotel. He instead lets himself outside to wait for his companion. Will ignores the route to the cellar studiously. His work there is done. 

Chiyoh, Will is beginning to realize, is going to be a less than communicative travel partner, the same way she’s a less than communicative host. There’s a strange symmetry in her company that makes him think of Bedelia Du Maurier, everything done in pairs. Does Hannibal tell her what and when they’re moving, inevitably drawn to the homes of his heart if not his family? Is she supportive? That’s what Will is doing with Chiyoh now, letting her take the driver’s seat, isn’t it? Is he supportive too, or is there something valuable in guiding him that he can’t see?

In some ways he wonders why he’s been allowed to tag along at all. Maybe she should just...leave him an address? Maybe a phone number to contact Murasaki at? ( _Wouldn’t she be happier? Wouldn’t you?_ )

While Chiyoh’s attachment to the property has dwindled in the evening as she slowly snuffs out the familiar features of it, he watches now from the gate while she checks for a final time windows, seals on fireplace flues, fretting on the front step quietly about leaving. Has she thought of everything? Has she forgotten something? Will it be ok if she never comes back? So much more extreme than the usual do I need a hairbrush, do I have all my underwear - she’s likely leaving forever, and the world is big and has clearly forgotten her. 

Will can understand the anxiety. He felt the same leaving the dogs with the neighbors, ( _the Harrisons - you know their name_ ) and locking up the cottage in Wolf Trap. 

( _There’s no kind way to tell a dog you might not be back. There’s no kind way for you to justify it either. They ask to be pet and comforted in their confusion, and you, painfully slow and simply painfully, work your way back to the car to leave._ ) 

“Did you leave the oven on?” he asks in the dark, and only smiles when she looks confused and then irritated.

She breathes out one quick sigh. “I’ve been to town many times, but always with the expectation I would come back to the manor,” she explains, fidgeting the edge of a glove, big leather suitcase to her side and the satchel slung over the other. “I had not realized how many things needed to be done to prepare it to be empty.” 

“It could burn down tomorrow, and only you would care,” he says, turning his head to take a last look at the turret in the dark. 

“But I _would_ care,” she replies. 

She struts down the gravel road with her luggage to the rental car outside the gates, and ignores Will’s attempts to help her despite its substantial weight. Will is somewhat relieved in that he has two bad shoulders and can’t imagine lifting it while he’s still sore from hanging the prisoner in his cage, but she cuts a sad figure not trying to look back. She insists on driving. She insists on not playing the radio. 

With two hours to the airport and no sleep to speak of, Will shrugs. Probably for the best. 

\---

Riding in the rental car, a beat up silver Skoda that likely has seen service since the fall of the Soviet Union, from Utena to Vilnius to go to the airport is one of the weirdest liminal spaces in Will’s life. It’s silent for the whole two hours, with only tired breathing between the two of them. Will’s familiar with long silences - he’s not familiar with ones filled with thoughts other than his. 

Chiyoh is, for all that she is an often incomprehensible piece of work, clearly uncertain what she’s supposed to do now that she’s resolved to go to Murasaki instead of Hannibal directly. Will finds his mind reaching out to connect and only finding static as if she’s temporarily offline. She’s been so even keeled up to this point that it distresses him, and he doesn’t know if he’s distressed because he personally is, or if her distress is bleeding over into him. 

She knows where she stands with Hannibal, so it’s not him that bothers her, Will thinks, even if there’s a chance she’s stood guard over some random undesirable that Hannibal decided would be her cross to bear. There’s more to that story, he’s sure, but the only person who knows is the least likely to tell the truth without some benefit of his own. 

It’s Murasaki that she’s left to the wayside for Hannibal, and what proud child isn’t embarrassed to call wanting to come back home? 

It’s not that he’s never traveled in female company and doesn’t know what to say, because even despite her hesitation to engage with him interpersonally, Alana went to conferences just as much as he did. For investigations, Beverly got it into her head that they were going to be friends and called the window seat in his row over and over again to Will’s irritation. Abigail had been a suspicious but talkative passenger en route to Minnesota, and even in the haze of being sick, Will manages small talk and the simple conversations that parents give older children. ( _Have you thought about what you want to do next? Can you let me know what you think of this? Do you think you’ll be safe? We can do what you want, I just need to do this one thing first._ ) She hates it, because no doubt everyone asks her those things, but she indulges Will, because Will means well and she so desperately wants for someone to mean well.

The shadows of the surrounding woods and high fields reach out onto the narrow roads until the highway opens up before them, empty and quiet next to the farms and villages of the countryside. Will comments on the national park nearby, on the cost of fuel, on the cows being different from the ones he’s used to. Chiyoh nods, sometimes hums. She keeps the cab of the car hot, like it’s a rare novelty, and suggests Will just take a quick respite while there’s time. Will sweats in his jacket, and shuts his eyes to the sound of the wheels on the road to let her think. 

Will’s fine with her abruptness for now - it’s clearly a confusing time for her, as the last couple days have consistently been. He _is_ , however, seriously considering just seeing if he can’t Google Murasaki Lecter’s home and travel by himself if she’s going to keep him in the dark for the next long 24 hours. 

She had watched the house disappear as they drove into the cold morning, the last familiar sight. Will paid it no mind. ( _Not important to Hannibal, not important to understanding him any longer, not important to you._ ) 

\---

There are navy blue seats in the airplane, formed in tight little rows of two, with little to no room for Will’s duffel, and that his knees push up against. He’s not unfamiliar with this setup, even if it is half a globe away from the last small craft flight he crawled into. 

Chiyoh, wielding her leather suitcase rather like a shield, looks less familiar and frustrated when the flight crew during boarding take it from her. She has imperiously glided through most of the proceedings up to this point without complaint after returning the car, but the cracks begin to show with each moment they get closer to departure. 

“You know they typically give them back, right?” Will says with one-eye open in the brightly lit cabin, minding his knees against the chairback tray. “Standard procedure?” 

She nods stiffly, but still seems adrift when she takes the aisle seat next to him, looking from back to front. People shuffle in, and she watches as the plane fills with tired families and business travelers. After a moment’s stillness, she gives off an almost imperceptible sigh. 

Will takes in her small clenched hands in her lap, and almost sighs at himself, and his growing habit of making assumptions. “...First time flying?” he asks. 

“No,” she says slowly, offended. “But certainly the first time since I arrived in Lithuania.” 

What’s the wide world outside of Utena look like now, compared to what she knew then? What’s happened since the early 1990’s? She’s not ignorant, but small towns don’t radically change, and the flip phone she has speaks to pertinent purchase years back rather than an interest in now vintage technology. 

“Murasaki brought me with her when she moved to France - I was maybe four years old,” she says after a long pause. “We flew first class, and I sat between her and her husband. Robertas called me _belle lapin_ because my eyes were wide through the takeoff.” She turns her head, jaw pushed a little outward in thought. “The seats were bigger then,” she complains quietly. 

Will nods. “Yeah, I remember that too,” and he does - a trip to Washington to visit a cousin of his father’s in Tacoma, getting seats in front of the wings, drinking ginger ale and eating cold sandwiches from the flight attendant while his father reads a tattered copy of Vonnegut to his right. He thinks of it as very decadent at the time, even if it was just basic necessities. 

“Just got used to the shrinking over the years. Something about saving costs,” he says with a twist of his mouth. 

Her nose scrunches. “That’s a ridiculous excuse - you’re not even as fat as some Americans are, and you look uncomfortable. What does everyone else do?” 

The barking laugh escapes before Will can stop it. “Thanks?” he says. “Survive, I guess.”

( _No shit._ ) 

She goes quiet and terse at takeoff, and again over some rough weather north of Riga when the overhead storage rattles and the wings give bouncing shakes. Nothing too out of the ordinary, but still new. Her little fingers are white at the nail beds from clutching the armrests. She leaves little crescents in the plastic, even as her face is peaceful. 

Will considers, unearths from beneath his rusted insight the idea of Chiyoh, comfortably ensconced in her countryside prison for many years, feet firmly planted on the ground. She’s a woman of practicality that was not much more than a kid herself when she came to be the prison keeper, alive with indignation for a friend - a cousin of a sort he pictures, and she is incandescent with the rage all teenagers have for injustices in the absence of complete information or experience or practicality, or all three. She had probably taken the train from Paris - she and Hannibal alike are protected by Robertas and Murasaki Lecter’s wealth at this age, but not so much as to have the freedom to finance a revenge scheme, and flying has not always been cheaply available. Surely someone would have stopped _her_ , even if they didn’t stop _him_.

Again the impression - a misplaced, well loved child. 

No, Chiyoh hasn’t been in a plane since she was too young to really remember it, some round cheeked young girl clutching fingers into the arm rests then, fingers plucking at the sleeve of her guardian until sleep takes her over the steppes of southern Russia, into the high ceilings of Frankfurt, and on into the foreign richness of Paris and the French countryside.

“Failure rate on these things is ridiculously low,” he comments off-hand, swimming out from the murk of perception. “About 1 in 11 million.” 

“So there’s a failure rate,” she says flatly, mouth thin before breathing in and out, slow and measured. Will looks away, sympathetic. She’s been irritated with weakness over the last day or two, more so since killing her prisoner like that should have resolved all her hangups, _you’re a grown-up now._ She eventually swallows and sits in stillness until the small islands off the coast of Latvia and Estonia begin to dot the landscape below, and the Baltic Sea spreads wide.

She nods, relaxing her hands on the armrests, and Will takes that as all the acknowledgement he’ll get. He can feel her anxiety in his bones, even as his own sneaks away with the small lights of the seaside towns and cities below. No use being nervous now - they’re on their way. 

\---

Hannibal, as a rule, doesn’t travel far with Will during his time as his not-psychiatrist, choosing instead to field small phone calls during the day, random office meetings when circumstances push Will his way, and on occasion drive out with him in the evenings if it’s convenient. 

( _This is true until he steals your skin, speaking in your stead over the bodies of the dead. You’re obviously not available in the bowels of Baltimore State - no harm, no foul, right Will?_ )

Will wonders sometimes how many of the phone calls in the early days were interspersed with more morbid things - salting hams made of rude attendants, draining a meticulous venous piece of flesh, enjoying a Riesling while he waits, watching Will’s number light up his cell phone screen. Given the basement of the house and its extensive sound-proofing, he wonders how many of those morbid things were happening as he literally dined above, but Hannibal has proven to be an excellent multi-tasker, and the fine hairs on the back of Will’s neck raise at the idea of any conversation between them that was had from a distance. 

There’s this assumption that his sense of elegance overrides simple practical decision making, but Will knows Hannibal kept the phone on himself at all times. While it’s true that it takes a particular type of person to plant a tree in a parking lot using a man’s body as a graft that will have diatoms that lead to a secret lair, and how fucking ridiculous and theatrical was _that_ whole scenario, but missing a phone call from a client, or Jack Crawford, or Will, is the difference between reasonable alibis that let him get ahead of the message or being unable to account for his time. Hannibal is never without it, matte gold plated exterior and all - sense of theatre and elegance be damned. 

But he digresses.

There are two exceptions to this rule in the entirety of their relationship before the prison, and definitely before the decision was made to evenly coat the Mount Vernon house’s kitchen with his and Abigail’s innards like he’s planning on re-tiling the place anyway. 

The first exception is Minnesota - “I have a particular interest,” he explains to Alana, when they return with Abigail, and she takes it at face value, as does Will. He travelled there once already to see Will open fire on Hobbs with the scrutiny of an instructor watching a test. It only made sense that he would want to see how that thread of thought was tied off. 

The second exception is exceedingly brief by comparison - a train ride from Baltimore into Philadelphia. Will doesn’t remember the exact circumstances other than someone is dead, and it was hugely inconvenient.

( _That’s the typical circumstances anyway._ ) 

“I’m sorry, I’ve got to take this,” he says to Hannibal while looking at his own phone, who hasn’t yet settled in at their customary seats. Jack Crawford’s name is a sans-serif curse written across the glass screen. 

“Please,” says Hannibal with a thoughtless wave of his hands, so casual. “It’s your time, Will.”

( _It’s never really on your time though, is it?_ )

Answering is a mistake - the barrage of information and crass manipulation he receives is confusing, even by his usual standards. Just making sense of where he needs to go ends up superseding half of the time for their appointment that evening, all the while Hannibal just watches with the smooth grace of a marble bust. Between the quitting time traffic, construction on Highway 95, and his already close proximity to Penn Station, taking the train just makes sense to get to the crime scene as quickly as possible. 

Initially Will is prepared to go alone, Jack making noises and promises of driving him back when the investigation is complete for the night. It’s going to be a long one, promises or no. Will anticipates coffees grabbed from a convenience store at the wee hours of the morning, and having to text Alana and the department head at Quantico at the last minute to beg off for the day and find a substitute. Jack as a designated driver is as good as a guarantee for a hard and thankless way to spend a Wednesday night. Jack, with his oscillating between pep talks and frustration, just kind of compounds the miserableness of carpooling. 

“Ah yes, nothing like negotiating yourself into your very own hostage situation,” muses Hannibal when Will explains the details and Jack’s offer, shrugging on his overcoat and lambskin gloves with all the flair of a person on a mission. “But if it’s as urgent as Jack Crawford would have you think, then I should take you to the station to avoid any further delay.” 

( _Really, he’s more of the Sherlock Holmes type than you have ever been - it would make more sense for you to follow in his steps, marveling at his clarity of thought, while you, the narrative’s skeptic, hide in his long shadow._ )

Hannibal, in one of his shows of camaraderie that Will has learned to suspect to be a source of amusement in hindsight, not only drives him to Penn Station, but parks and boards the 8:34 pm Northeast Regional train line, briefcase in hand, and takes a seat with Will in a forward facing bench in a car towards the back, and doesn’t try to pollute the situation with conversation, even when Will tries to convince him that he really doesn’t need to cross state lines for an all-nighter. He only smiles, takes out paper, a pen from his pocket, and diligently begins to make notes in his usual strange shorthand - something convoluted and numerical in equal measure. 

Will never pays much attention to these notes at the time, even when the two of them are burning volumes and volumes of them together before...well, before. It would be very like Hannibal to combine languages or algorithms to make them more entertaining for him to write, and more difficult for an outsider to understand. Hindsight makes Will hungry for insights - he can’t picture a scenario that Hannibal wouldn’t have had the diligent note-taking of a scientist when presented with a new place to explore, and Will is hungry for an uncompromised view of what exactly Hannibal was thinking when he left Will’s brain to catch fire. When did it transition from assisted destruction to the desire for friendship? When did his detachment replace itself with ravenous greed for his company?

( _Sooner than you think. That’s why it bothered him, and he hurt you to make sure he wasn’t perhaps just mistaken._ ) 

Will falls asleep leaning against the window of the train car - it’s a short ride, but he’s already exhausted, and he’s always been inclined to sleeping in moving vehicles. There’s so rarely opportunities for good rest outside of them. 

He wakes a few times on this trip, the first time when they cross the confluence of the Gunpowder River, and the reflection of the industrial lights off the water briefly makes him homesick for the bus ride home from school in middle school, and the humidity of the Gulf. The second time is at the buzz of a text message in his pocket, where his cell phone sits, potent with Jack’s impatience, a hundred emails, and a couple of photos he snapped of the light coming through his bedroom window this morning, and how the steam from the shower lit them with a diffused glow. 

He leans his head back into the glass, and tries to disperse with the rivers into the Atlantic and be forgotten for the remaining 30 minutes of the ride. Hannibal is a solid presence to his left, with nothing but the sound of the rails and the fountain pen scratching the paper to accompany him.

Despite proferrals of rides home, always just a few more minutes, let’s talk to this guy, let’s speak with the commissioner again... the end of the night never seems to be in sight when they find Jack in the back parking lot of a strip mall. Even after Will proclaims it to be a rather uninteresting murder ( _like we’re keeping score now_ ), he persists in keeping their attention. Will can look at this in retrospect and see the drive of a man avoiding going home to his wife, who isn’t talking to him right now. Depending on how cynical he’s feeling, he can also look at this and see it as Jack seeing how high Will can jump, and if Lecter will jump with him. A two for one deal. 

Fortunately for Will, his companion of chance isn’t much of a jumping show horse, for all that the pedigree and shapeliness is there. The seemingly tireless Hannibal who follows without complaint finally makes excuses for them both, holding aloft his phone like it’s some sort of holy beacon, but also shrugging because what can you do? He has clients coming in a few hours to the practice ( _a truth_ ), and Will’s car is in front of his vehicle at his house ( _a lie_ ), so they’ll have to be off now. “Truly sorry for the inconvenience, Jack,” he says, and it sounds so real. “It seems like you’ve got this pretty well handled.” 

It’s such a normal thing, no different than helping a friend skip out of meeting an ex-wife, or cutting a family visit short. Will would probably write him a sonnet for helping if he wasn’t so goddamn cold and tired. He’s practically led back to the nearest train station, two fingers and a thumb guiding him by the back of the arm. 

The third time he wakes on the train is on the way back - they’re crossing the Susquehanna River this time, and the tinny sound of the interior of the train changes as they cross the water. It’s just after 6 am, and the autumn sun is rising, and Will is warm and comfortable in the shell of Hannibal’s wool overcoat, which has been draped in a diagonal across his chest, held at the shoulder. 

“You were quite pale,” Hannibal says from his seat without raising his head from more notes, not a hair out of place, not a yawn to be seen as one accustomed to late nights feels. The dark grey and white of the windowpane check of his suit are wrinkled, the only sign of any stress. It should have been another clue falling into place, the pins of a lock moving as a key slides in, but all that Will gets from it is his eyes rolling back into his head to keep sleeping and a quiet gratitude.

“Thanks,” sighs Will, and the peculiar kind of tired that comes from all-nighters crashes back down on him in the dim cabin lights. He could be in college again, or finishing a beat in New Orleans, and in any of those places there will be the comfort of a nest of sheets and a bad cup of coffee waiting for him. He looks forward to it.

He thinks Hannibal adjusts the coat and his arms to cover his hands, but that might just be him, drawing into himself where it’s safe. It smells of donuts in Penn Station. The commute back to Hannibal’s is all of a few blocks, coming to rest underneath a sugar maple with spidery red leaves, and he’s guided out of his seat by broad hands, less subtle now away from Jack and the others. 

“Call me when you get to the house,” says Hannibal, trying to send him off with not-at-all-bad coffee. The ceramic of the travel mug is warm in his hands. “I’d appreciate it if you would let me know you returned safely. You look tired.” Will nods, and holds his phone like a lucky talisman, blearily winding his way opposite of commuter traffic until his own home opens up before him in the morning sun. He doesn’t ever drink the coffee, just holds it in his right hand which stays soft and comfortable in the hour drive, smelling it in the cold staleness of his Volvo.

He has a lot of memories like this where Hannibal is kind to him. It’s what makes the other ones feel less comfortable in tandem with them. He supposes it’s nice he has nothing bad to recall, traveling with him like this. It’s somewhere to retreat to. Not the same way the sunlight through the office windows is one, but an uncomplicated spot to rest his thoughts and just not feel bad for a few minutes. 

Will doesn’t change his phone number before crossing the Atlantic. In some ways, it’s still a lucky talisman, like he only needs to pull up Hannibal’s number and let him know _I survived, even if Abigail didn’t. I saw your dancing skeletons, and you saw_ me _lay with them. I saw your sister’s grave. I found your childhood friend. I’m hoping I can sleep soon, but I’m counting on your aunt to tell me something that I can live with about you so that I can live with myself. We’ll have so much to talk about someday._

Even now in Italy, though probably with a new matte gold plated phone and phone number, because even cellular phone plans will struggle with making you accountable for continued service when you’re a felon multiple times over and evading capture by the police in multiple jurisdictions, Will feels confident that Hannibal knows his number, and might just check in on him if he takes too long getting somewhere familiar. 

He might not be willing to come to Will, but he’s always been available to talk to him. Will tries not to count on it - he doesn’t know what he would do if it happened. 

\---

Will opens his eyes to the brisk white light of the morning, shining through low banks of cloud, and thinks for a moment that he is on the train again. The seat’s on the wrong side. Chiyoh’s eyes are tired and shiny in a way that Hannibal’s never are, and Will has to chew the inside of his lip to keep from reaching for the cover of a coat that’s not there, but the quietude of his exhausted sleep feels similar. Drive home to the dogs, prep a lecture for tomorrow, get a pot of coffee going in the kitchen. The absence of that clarity of purpose is disorienting. 

The two hours over the Baltic Sea went quicker than he expected. The sun is fully risen and cold-looking over the tarmacs and terminals of Helsinki’s airport, looking like every other airport Will knows. 

The tension goes out of Chiyoh’s shoulders when the tires hit the concrete, but her determined look comes alive again with each moment they draw closer to the gate. When the doors open and the ladder to disembark is rolled up, she escapes the interior of the plane like she’s briskly walking to the Queen of England to inform her London has fallen, with an old flip phone in hand that she holds towards her face with some intensity. Checking for signal, Will intuits. Checking in with whoever Chiyoh knows to check in with. 

Will just shakes his head and lopes along, glad to stretch his legs and escape the stale dry air of the plane. Outside, it is crisp and damp with the dissipating marine fog. 

The nature of last minute travel is that it is often not convenient. While the small travel office in Utena is able to arrange flights for them at the last minute with relatively little trouble from Lithuania to Finland thanks to the Schengen rules, the ability to simply fly across the majority of Asia and still clear all of the international flight restrictions is less convenient by a margin of an 8-hour layover. 

It doesn’t bode well how much his stomach hurts from such a short leg of the journey. The 12-hour flight awaiting him at the end of the day will be a challenge. Honestly, for such a non-fatal injury, Will wishes his stab wound could be a less obnoxious one. It’s a spiteful little pain, and the deliberation behind that makes Will’s teeth grind. 

( _“You’ll be at risk for clotting for a long time yet, Mr. Graham,” says that same officious attending doctor, like you should be happy to hear that not only did your kidneys remain intact at no particular effort made by the emergency room staff but instead by Hannibal Lecter, but that you also should be wary of the probably most gracious death the universe could give you - a quick clot to the basilar artery that you would literally not know hit you. You nod at your instructions, and laugh at the irony of being medically mandated to take aspirin daily._ ) 

He passes through the airport terminal gate with bag in hand, but sees no Chiyoh, or her unfortunately large suitcase. 

_Very well_ , he thinks, fighting back suspicion. Everyone can do with a little space before the next round. Chiyoh has gone to lick her wounds, and presumably make a call. As long as it’s not to impede him, Will just has to accept it. He considers the rows of grey chairs, the gridwork of triangles in the floor, and sighs, already ready to sit again. He needs caffeine.

Never let it be said Will considers himself a man of sophistication - Will is a man of habit and life is unfamiliar lately, and upon seeing the familiar sign, he gravitates to the nearest Starbucks in his terminal. His needs are simple - a padded chair, plain coffee, and electrical ports. In quick succession, he also orders a hot chocolate to warm his hands. 

The smell is distinctly different from the hot chocolate from a packet of his youth that was Beau’s tried and true mood improver. Not quite the same magic solution - but it certainly can’t hurt to try, he thinks. ( _God knows the quality might be better here than it ever was in a trailer-camper-public housing-anywhere you shared your space with him, and isn’t travel supposed to improve memory? So improve it._ ) 

He sighs, looks out from the interior of the shop to the slow early morning shuffle of travelers, and wonders not for the first time where he’s going with all this.

The reality of the situation: Will is by himself in a Finnish airport, Chiyoh somewhere in the depths of the terminal doing whatever it is that Chiyoh does when she’s unable to pheasant hunt, intimidate him with a rifle, and or look vaguely impugned upon. ( _Presumably, you think, she can still look impugned upon - maybe it’s not just you. Maybe she hates everyone._ ) He has his small duffel of necessities because even he is occasionally overtaken by the fear he doesn’t have enough clean underwear, he has to carry his assortment of anti-coagulants and hydrocodone on his person, and having the ability to occasionally slip a book or paperwork where he doesn’t have to literally hold it in his hands or in his coat, no matter how many extraneous pockets it has for a person not tactically shooting or actively fly fishing, is nice.

( _You are practical like Chiyoh too - it’s something you have and can use, and it feels a little less awkward hauling it around with the merino wool suit you’ve saved just for this trip hidden inside, like you’re still you despite this weird need to impress. You don’t dig into that. Much._ )

He feels like he understands less the further away he gets from Palermo, and what felt like the inevitability of Florence. ( _City of his mother, home of his talents, a keeper for all the fine things Hannibal Lecter needs to fill his life with to replace the ones he’s opted to discard. He even replaced you._ ) 

It’s inevitable the way that impending slow deaths are, anticipated firings, knowing when you open the door the thing behind it will be broken as you suspect. Will took himself across the sea with the surety of it. This is a detour, because the straight route’s arrival time is sooner than he’s actually ready for. 

\---

He wakes around mid-afternoon, when the light has gone more grey with incoming clouds that promise rain. Will comes back from dozing in his uncomfortable terminal chair, where two chairs over, Chiyoh sits, prim and proper and with the same upright vigilance that characterizes most of what Will sees of her. 

She has **_Madame Bovary_ ** out of her satchel and in her hands, lines of French decorating the butter-yellow pages of the chapter. He guesses that’s something he hasn’t considered - she lived with Murasaki and Hannibal in France before she ran aground in the Lithuanian countryside. She no doubt has a proficiency. There are two or three newspapers as well, a book or two next to her satchel, and a shiny white bag from the duty-free store.

“Customary to bring a present,” she says, sensing his gaze, and carding a finger into her book to save her spot. “I don’t know much about flying, or modern airports, but the idea of a gift shop is hardly new.”

Will nods. “And what does Helsinki have to offer in the way of gifts?”

“Alcohol,” she says flatly, eyes darting to her bag.

“Should I bring some as well?” asks Will, voice dry from the temperature controlled coolness of the terminal and sleep. “Not much of a homecoming party with only one kind of booze, don’t you think? Wouldn’t want to be rude and show up empty-handed.” 

Chiyoh seems to consider, eyes still down in her book. 

She opens the white bag, and out comes two boxes of chocolate. Clenched in her hands, the dark blue of the foil makes them valuable with purpose.

“I had only meant to buy one,” she says quietly, “You may give her the second, if you wish.” 

He turns his head towards her and her blue boxes, warmed by her temporary kindness. Will supposes it’s something like a truce for her, after a hard time in Will’s company. She could have ditched him at any point. He turns one of the proffered boxes in his hand, looking at the foiled paper and children’s characters on the outside. Appropriate for surrogate daughters to their mothers, or handmaidens to their noble ladies - it’s cute. She’s embarrassed to show it, but does anyway. Maybe she meant one for herself - she’s not been here any more than Will has. 

It must be tiring, being Chiyoh, being unsure if she can relax, if she knows how, if all that’s been formed of her adulthood is the need for watchfulness. Her perception is as pointed as his, but to one side, where it is sharp on several beveled edges, made painful by her inexperience with people and her desire to avoid them. Will can sympathize with that - she doesn’t have to be soft with understanding the way he does, and wonders if that’s not somehow better. Healthier. Everything and everyone is other.

( _She’s you in different circumstances. What do you wish someone would have done for you?_ )

“Probably best for me to grab something to thank Murasaki for her help,” he says gently, handing back the box. “I’ll need to find something for you at some point as well,” he adds, and at her blank look, shakes his head. “For hosting, despite...well,” he shrugs, "everything I guess. You should save those for the flight.”

She nods smoothly, closing up the bag, returning to her book like it’s a settled matter, arms close to her body, ignoring passers-by. 

Chiyoh never really acknowledges him after that, sitting in relative stillness for a couple of hours, and Will returns the favor, reading something flavorless and popular from the bookstore stands with quickly casting eyes. They could be mistaken for strangers still, but the seat between them is clearly saved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> .  
> .  
> .  
> .  
> .  
> Look at them, tentatively getting along. It's like befriending a wild animal that you want to help, only they both think they're the people.
> 
> Thanks to everyone that has read the story this far - I promise there will be more Hannibal in the coming chapters, but I appreciate the patience while we work our way to him.


End file.
